Android Game Review: Temple Run 2

Temple Run was a enormous success in its launch day and is still one of the most downloaded games on the Google Play Store. However, the time has come for it to retire, as it has been here for quite some time now. It was no secret that the Imangi Studios had been doing quite a hard work recently in order to bring us a true sequel of the original, but now here it is: Temple Run 2 is now officially launched on the Google Play Store and it aims on becoming a worthy successor of the old one and even beat it in its own game.

It’s quite obvious that Temple Run 2 carries some of the same DNA as its predecessor, but we can clearly say it has evolved much more than anyone had expected. Firstly, it has brought us new graphics, beautiful new environments, new abilities and power-ups and much more things that are covered further in this topic.

As in the other two games, the goal here is to run as far as you can without tripping, falling in a pit or get squished by the huge monkey(yes, they’ve made it bigger and more lethal this time!). While running, it’s needed to collect coins which can be later used for upgrading the abilities. You may also collect a power-up while going for a run, which helps you in several different ways. The library of power-ups is bigger and more versatile than before, which range from some of lower to some of higher importance. Also, watch out for the rare gems. They can be used for upgrading some special abilities of your character as well as receiving a second chance once you lose.

The control scheme is by no means different than the typical one found in Temple Run. Your player is controlled by tilting the device left or right, turning can be done by swiping on the screen in the corresponding directions, the same applies to jumping as well. Turning too early will cause the player to trip and jumping too early will land you in an endless pit. Nothing unusual here. However, there’s a slightly small addition and that’s the double tap, which activates a special power once your power meter reaches maximum capacity.

There is a countless number of achievements in Temple Run 2. Completing them will advance you to more and more new levels, which makes the achievement system make a lot more sense now. Advancing to a new level also awards you a bunch of coins that can be further spent on upgrades for your power-ups.

In the menu, it’s possible to do several things that are of big importance: seeing the statistics, pending achievements, getting some more coins in case you run out of them and you badly need some more, accessing the settings menu etc. We quite like the new layout, because everything is now more organized and looks the way it should have always looked. A bit of the simplicity is lost though, and currently the only way to access the main start screen is to restart the whole game. One thing we noticed, though, is that it’s impossible to get out of the game with the back button and the only way to do it is to press the home button, which will leave the game in memory. This bug has annoyed quite many users, including me, but considering the fact that this is the first release, it is not a problem at all.

The settings menu offers some additional options for you to configure. Among the usual volume controls, the developers have included an option to configure the graphical quality of the game. The default option is “better”, but newer devices should be able to handle it flawlessly even at the highest settings. Hence, even my HTC EVO 3D runs it at the highest setting without any hiccups.

The overall game quality is really impressive. We are very fond of this game‘s graphics. All of the characters are impressively modeled, so is the beautiful environment that offers breath-taking scenery as well as realistic shadows. Textures are of high quality, the menus look nice, organized and very polished. The audio effects, however, are no worse by any means. There are the realistic sounds produced by the characters and the environmental sounds are very life-like. Then there is the background music, which is calming and fits the setting of the game.

The developers have really worked hard to make this game flawless at launch and I can confidently say they have nearly succeed at it. For most of the time, it constantly runs at impressive frame-rate, though there’s a slight frame drop when entering the mine. Navigating through the menus is a breeze, with minimal to no loading times whatsoever.

We are not afraid to call Temple Run 2 one of the best games, if not the best one of the year. Sure, it’s only the year’s beginning, but this game has a huge potential that in our opinion will be not surpassed in the near future, at least not in this category. If you are interested in taking a closer at it, Temple Run 2 can be downloaded from the Google Play Store for free.

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